Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University, America’s most influential
Christian pacifist, has a new article respectfully critiquing famed
Christian apologist C.S. Lewis’s support for Just War. The piece
is worth reading both because Hauerwas is guru to so many clergy
and because few pacifists in the church have the verve to challenge
Lewis so directly.
Hauerwas recounts Lewis’s service in World War I, in which he
was wounded, and his support for Britain’s role in World War II. He
emphasizes the former, which includes Lewis’ horror of what he saw
and experienced. Not as much does Hauerwas describe and challenge
Lewis on WWII, for which Lewis was a thoughtfully ardent
enthusiast. Instead he cites Lewis’s discomfort during WWII over a
clergyman’s citation in public prayer of the nation’s stance as
“righteous,” which Lewis thought presumptuous. But in fact Lewis
did think British resistance to Hitlerism was quite righteous. And
perhaps Hauerwas is more comfortable in addressing WWI, in which
the consequences of Allied defeat were not as morally dramatic as
in WWII.
In his 1940 talk, “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” on which Hauerwas
focuses, Lewis speculated on the unpleasantness of a “Germanized”
Europe absent Allied resistance in 1914. How much more Lewis must
have believed so later in WWII when the full horrors of Nazism were
unveiled.
Overall Hauerwas is relatively fair in describing Lewis’s views,
which he notes mostly rested not specifically on Christian teaching
but more on natural law assumptions. Hauerwas, like his influential
teacher, the late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, and like
their teacher, Karl Barth, mostly rejects natural law, though he
declines to detail that view here. He describes Lewis as responding
to liberal pacifism, which understands war to be mostly a
misunderstanding among good people. Hauerwas does not disagree with
Lewis in that critique of “far too easy a target,” i.e. the dreamy
liberalism of post WWI.
“I have spelled out Lewis’s arguments against pacifism not only
in an effort to be fair to him, but because he gives voice to what
many assume are the knockdown arguments against any account of
Christian nonviolence,” Hauerwas writes. But he claims Lewis “made
little effort to understand the most defensible forms of Christian
pacifism.” Hauerwas, relying on Yoder, espouses a “Christological”
pacifism that understands Jesus’ work on the cross as a rejection
of all violence.
Hauerwas insists his pacifism doesn’t depend on any single
saying of Jesus but on the “very character of Jesus’s life, death
and resurrection.” Yoder identified “such Christological
nonviolence as the pacifism of the messianic community,” he
recalls. “Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community
that is an alternative to the world’s violence.” After all, Jesus
offered a “new moral option in Palestine, at the cost of his
death.” Nonviolence is integral to being His disciple.
Countering Lewis’s concern to protect the innocent from
homicidal maniacs, Hauerwas insists there are “nonviolent
alternatives” to defend against “unjust attack,” without saying
what they are. He complains Lewis only defended the “police
function of governing authorities,” which is mostly “peaceable,”
when war is a “different reality.”
Hauerwas affirms Lewis’s warnings against soaring idealism and
urges “limited objectives” allowing “Christians in a world of war
to do the small and simple things that make war less likely.”
Rejecting war is the “necessary condition to force us to consider
possibilities that would not otherwise exist.”
Not noted by Hauerwas is that Lewis, in his 1940 talk, rejected
pacifism because he supposed the New Testament is “consistent with
itself,” and that the Apostles Peter and Paul, in affirming the
civil magistrate’s vocation for force, were not contradicting their
Lord. Otherwise, he warned, we must believe Christ’s “true meaning”
was hidden from his closest followers only to be “discovered in our
own time.” For Hauerwas, the “true meaning” was largely unearthed
even after Lewis spoke these words, in the books of Professor
Yoder. Lewis notes that from the Apostles onward, “All bodies that
claim to be Churches - that is, who claim apostolic succession and
accept the Creeds - have constantly blessed what they regarded as
righteous arms.”
Hauerwas is an unapologetic sectarian who believes the central
message of Christianity, which he claims is non-violence, has been
ignored or minimized by the vast majority of churches and
Christians from nearly the very beginning. It’s a very elitist
stance that understandably appeals to very smart, and sometimes
very self-satisfied seminarians and professors.
In contrast, Lewis, although himself an academic, believed in a
“mere Christianity” that transcended denominational boundaries. He
was the writer of children’s novels and a popular radio broadcaster
who affirmed the importance of worshipping at the side of the local
grocer and not confining company to intellectual soul mates. Deeply
unlike Hauerwas and his followers, who contemptuously reject
patriotism as idolatry, Lewis identified it as one of the “four
great loves.” Love of God is not confined to regard for His church
but includes and even begins with affection for family, friends,
and country.
Lewis is vastly popular across church traditions because he
strove to convey essential truths to broad audiences. The far more
narrow Hauerwas/Yoder attempt to redefine Christian orthodoxy is
provocative and sophisticated. But will it endure?
